Health tech company Elation Health acquired startup Aster to propel the company's development of an agentic AI operating system for primary care.
Elation Health provides an electronic health record specifically for primary care physicians. Aster, launched in 2023, is an AI-native EHR for women’s health that developed technology to automate front-office coordination and operational tasks through voice AI, such as appointment scheduling, insurance verification, patient adherence, lab result management and care navigation.
This is Elation's second acquisition, following the purchase of Lightning MD in 2023.
"Aster is a women's health-focused EHR company that is built with AI at its core. They serve the women's health, midwifery and OB-GYN market, and we're excited about the team joining Elation and helping us push forward our AI-native vision for EHRs in a way that also allows us to be more comprehensive in our primary care view," Kyna Fong, co-founder and CEO of Elation Health, told Fierce Healthcare.
She added, "Obviously, women's health itself is a critical part of primary care, and it adds on to our foray into pediatrics last year as we continue to deepen our platform." Elation Health expanded its pediatric capabilities last year.
Sisters Fifi Kara and Lailah Kara-Newton, M.D., are co-founders of Aster and launched the company along with Nacho Vazquez, the company's chief technology officer who architected Aster's full-stack technology and AI capabilities.
Fifi Kara is a two-time founder, Y Combinator alum and Fulbright Scholar who previously led design for Meta's Health and Fitness organization. Lailah Kara-Newton earned her MBBS from Barts and The London School of Medicine and has practiced medicine, including obstetrics and gynecology, for more than seven years.
The sister co-founders built Aster after Dr. Kara-Newton experienced undiagnosed preeclampsia during her first pregnancy, resulting in an emergency C-section and NICU admission for her son. Determined to build technology that could prevent such outcomes, they created an AI-native platform for women's health providers, according to a press release.
Elation Health also was founded by siblings—Kyna and her brother Conan Fong—and they developed the EHR platform to digitize and improve their father’s primary care practice.
The Aster team built Atlas, a voice agent that automates front-office tasks for healthcare practices, according to a press release. Aster's co-founders and Vazquez are joining Elation's team to bring their expertise in autonomous AI agents, Fong noted.
"Aster has a phenomenal team. The folks there have a really unique background, between extensive experience at Meta on the design side and health and fitness to an actual clinician-turned-technology founder," she said. "In an AI-native world, when you're building these capabilities, a really talented team that has been hands-on with clinicians figuring out how AI can actually be useful at the point of care on the front lines, that is a unique talent."
Elation Health built its EHR to improve the primary care experience with a focus on the clinical use of the EHR, not strictly on the use of the technology as a billing tool.
Elation launched a major AI expansion of its platform in August, with a suite of natively-built AI products that can identify and proactively reach out to patients due for specific services, analyze population health data and explore it using natural language, and deliver clinical suggestions to doctors from the patient’s chart.
AI tools can "lighten the load" for primary care staff, Fong noted. "You can repurpose the staff towards those activities that AI can't do which is the relationship building, the clinical judgment, the creativity, the warmth of a patient experience," she noted.
In January, the EHR company unveiled that it had embedded Anthropic's Claude into its electronic health record to power its AI-driven chart summaries. The company’s clinical insights feature now uses Claude’s speed and long-context reasoning to synthesize complex, longitudinal patient data—including problem lists, medications, visit notes, labs and vitals—into concise summaries, according to the company.
The partnership with Anthropic takes Elation’s AI-native intelligence to “new heights,” Fong said in January.
In March, the company rolled out agentic billing workflows embedded in its platform to streamline work from pre-visit to payment.
There is tremendous opportunities for AI in healthcare but, currently, few in the industry are driving the levels of deep adoption and value on the front lines to meaningfully improve the experience for clinicians, Fong asserted.
"I think we've made tremendous strides with our AI-native EHR. The vast majority of our customers are using our AI," Fong said. "We are not interested in the hype of AI so much as we are interested in the step function impact, the time saved and the ability to focus on patients that has been central to Elation's mission since our founding."
Clinicians using Elation's AI features are seeing time savings of six to 10 hours per week, according to Fong.
"That's just the tip of the iceberg on the potential, and that gets us excited about how that allows our physicians and our customers to return that time to focusing on patient care and improving the patient experience," she added.
Primary care is poised to be one of the first clinical environments to advance autonomous operational AI in a way that reshapes day-to-day practice infrastructure, according to Fong.
"I think that the administrative burden on healthcare has really disproportionately landed on primary care physicians' shoulders, whether you're talking about prior authorizations or referrals or different administrative hurdles. Primary care is the one who sits shoulder to shoulder with the patient to help them navigate an increasingly complex healthcare system," she noted, while adding that value-based payment models also add complexity to primary care operations.
"Primary care has enormous opportunity to benefit from AI, and I think physicians are already starting to experience some of that," Fong said. "Primary care physicians have a disproportionate benefit, mostly because they've experienced disproportionate burden relative to what they're paid and what they're asked to do."
Elation Health's focus is to build AI capabilities that handle work on behalf of clinicians, not just assists them.
"As AI continues to develop and accelerate, we see ourselves as really taking that promise and turning it into value on the front lines," Fong said. "Agentic AI support allows a PCP to experience the relief of a burden being lifted from their shoulders because something can be taken care of, they don't have to worry about it, and that frees up headspace for them, for the judgment and the care for their patients to take center stage in their minds. I think that is going to be revolutionary. You're going to see more from Elation on that front—AI that lifts the burden and elevates the care experience."